


what's a soulmate?

by throughscentandtouch



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Fluff, Happy IDAHOT, I Tried, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, M/M, Natsu's POV, observing shou & kags relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-18
Updated: 2019-05-18
Packaged: 2020-03-07 06:19:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18867466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/throughscentandtouch/pseuds/throughscentandtouch
Summary: Hinata Natsu is 7 years old when she first learns the words ‘crush,’ ‘subdued,’ ‘Pluto,’ ‘queasy,’ and ‘shallow.’ She is 7 years old when she learns the difference between ‘like,’ and ‘love,’ and she is 8 years old when she first learns the word, ‘Soulmate.’





	what's a soulmate?

**Author's Note:**

> Wow, so this is my first fic in the Haikyuu!! fandom, huh?  
> Lmao, okay.  
> I wrote this for IDAHOT (International Day against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia) so, yeah, enjoy!

Shouyou had been acting weird lately. He was always staring out windows, smiling a smile that she didn’t recognize. And that was hard for Natsu to say because she knew her brother quite well and knew all his other smiles and laughs and faces.

“Mom,” Natsu asked her mother one day while watching Shouyou grin at nothing but the blank wall behind the shut-off TV, “why is Shouyou acting like that?”

Her mother looked up from the pot on the stove. “Eh? Oh, that,” she grinned excitedly as if hiding a secret. “It’s nothing, Natsu. Don’t you worry about it. You shouldn’t be thinking about that kind of stuff at your age.”

“What? What kind of stuff? Why? What do you mean?” confused questions poured out of her mouth as she bounced herself on her chair at the dining table. Her mother seemed content to simply let her talk, until she asked, “If I shouldn’t be thinking about it, why is Shouyou?”

“Ahh,” the woman closed her eyes. “Your brother is going through a certain time in his life, like all people will, including you, where he will act more distant and more snappy, and sometimes weird like this. It just means he’s growing up,” she said, pride clear in her voice.

But Natsu frowned. “What do you mean? I’m growing up too, aren’t I?!” the girl stood up on her chair, rising to about her mother’s shoulder height. “I’m growing up too.”

The older Hinata simply laughed. “Don’t worry, Natsu. You’ll get it one day.”

 

»»————-　♡　————-««

Natsu was confused on her math homework. Her teacher was stupid and never explained things well enough because Natsu knew that if she did, her homework would be much easier than it is now.

“Shou-chan!!” she shouted, bursting into her brother’s room with an excess of energy. “Help me with math!”

Shouyou only groaned in irritation. “I’m not good at this kinda stuff, Natsu,” he told her for what seemed like the 40th time. “I’m busy. Go ask Mom.”

Natsu quieted, her eyebrows furrowing together. He certainly didn’t _look_ busy.

Shouyou’s homework was set on his desk, a pencil in his hand, balancing precariously between his index finger and his thumb. He was facing the setting sun, just outside the window in front of his desk, with his cheek resting on the heel of his hand as the reddish hues of sunset colored his surroundings with the reflected light of his orange hair. His eyes were set just over the horizon, at the watercolor skies, where the orange sky met and mixed with the gentle, quiet, cool purples and blues. A gentle smile stretched across his lips, and his eyes were half closed as he sighed, brown orbs flickering in something Natsu recognized as similar to how he looked at her, sometimes, but starkly different in a manner that she simply was unable to grasp.

Her head tilted, lips parting quietly, as she witnessed a rare moment of Shouyou’s quiet side. Her pupils contracted and dilated as she studied his being, from his phosphorescent hair to the stain-glass casts of his shadows, and the glaring sun that he looked to.

She had the distinct feeling she was watching something peculiar, unfamiliar, _intimate_ , but natural and tender and kind.

Her instincts told her to smile. So she smiled, at her brother and his apparent happiness, even if she had no clue as to why exactly he was happy, but she smiled for him and, in a rare moment of consideration, noiselessly slid the door to his room shut.

 

»»————-　♡　————-««

 

Natsu’s father had never been so cryptic before.

“But Dad,” Natsu whined to her father, not too long after her mother’s own vague messages about her brother, “Shouyou’s definitely sick! He’s acting weird, he keeps spacing out, and he never hears me except when I talk about how cool his volleyball teammates are!”

It was genuinely worrisome, for Natsu, that her brother would not hear her and not be aware of his surroundings (though he rarely was outside the court) and that his mind would simply drift off with his eyes open, glazed in some weird emotion Natsu couldn’t put her finger on and with a dorky, stupid smile full of feelings that Natsu couldn’t even name.

Thus, it was definitely a sickness.

“No, Natsu,” her father smiled down at her, bouncing her on his knee, “Not a sickness. At least, not a physical one,” his grin widened. Her mother sighed from the kitchen.

But Natsu was just even more confused. “What do you mean? How can someone be sick, but not sick?”

“Oh, kiddo,” the man took off his glasses and placed his book on the arm of the couch, “Shouyou’s just being a teenager. Things like this will happen to you, when you get to be his age, too. And he’s not really sick at all, the boy’s just got a crush.”

“Crush?”

“Yep. A crush is when you have romantic feelings for someone,” he explained happily to her.

“Like you and Mom?”

Her father laughed heartily, the bright blue sky outside framing the profile of his head. “Yes, a little. But it’s different. Your mother and I love each other. If you have a crush on someone, you just like them.”

“... What’s the difference?” Natsu tilted her head in confusion.

“It’s… well, if you like someone romantically, you have possible romantic feelings for them, but they aren’t very deep, they’re shallow and probably based mainly off someone’s outward reputation or looks. But if you _love_ someone,” he glanced over to his wife, who was humming as she cooked dinner, “You truly love everything about their being, and accept every part of them, good or bad.”

In his eyes, the vibrant, lively greens of the trees outside were reflected, and they shone a vivid sky blue that perfectly encapsulated what Natsu now knew as the love her father felt for her mother. The white light of the content sun flickered over his face as the trees outside swayed in the wind, their shadows highlighting his warm brown eyes as they filled with pure joy and devotion.

The world was a little brighter, in Natsu’s eyes.

 

»»————-　♡　————-««

 

“Why are you acting so weird?” she asked him one day, after jumping on him as he stared out into their backyard.

“Hmm?” he looked down at her, a question in his eyes as they sad side by side at the edge of the porch to their mother’s garden. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Natsu pouted. “Yes, you do! You keep staring at nothing, and you’re always smiling weirdly and I’ve never seen you look at anything else like that except a volleyball!”

“Hey! W-wait, I still have no idea what you mean!”

“Shouyouuuuu!”Natsu tugged at her brother’s sleeve.

“Agh, stop it, Natsu, what do you want with me?” her brother whined.

“I wanna know who you have a crush on!”

Shouyou’s face colored, face bright, as he stammered a denial of Natsu’s statement. “N-no! I mean, I don’t - W-what do you know anyways!?” he scrambled away, and Natsu pouted.

“Well, fine. Be like that,” she said. “When Kageyama comes over I’m telling him about this!”

“N-no!” Shouyou shouted in her face. “NO! Don’t tell Kageyama!”

Natsu paused. “Why?”

“J-JUST DON’T!”

“Oooh,” Natsu tapped her chin. “Do you like Kageyama?”

Shouyou smothered Natsu in blankets, yelling at her to shut up. She took that as a yes.

 

»»————-　♡　————-««

 

Kageyama Tobio was one of the coolest people Natsu had ever seen. His eyes were a mysterious, night-blue steel, set in an intimidating glare, and the best thing about him was that he and Shouyou made the most amazing team.

The way that Shouyou and Kageyama worked together, just practicing with the smaller volleyball net behind their house, made her grin, eyes lighting up in awe and wonder. It was like something out of a movie; time would slow down, Shouyou would jump, Kageyama would do a perfect toss, and Shouyou would slam his hand down on the ball. It made her think to herself: _Maybe I could get someone to do amazing things like that with_.

One day, Natsu was watching them practice secretly. She knew she was supposed to be doing her homework, but she really didn’t care all that much about ‘I before e except after c’ when she already learnt that rule last year.

Her little head peeked out from the low windowsill, red hair hidden under a black cap for stealth. _No one will catch me like this,_ she grinned a little to herself.

Kageyama and Shouyou were practicing like always, one spike after the other, and occasionally trying new things. It never got old, for Natsu. She could watch the two play forever, the repetitive motions like an animation, their forms always outlined in the same fresh beauty that came with their smiles.

The two took a break, like always, and Natsu was just watching them for a couple minutes, taking note of how Shouyou always knew for some reason that Kageyama really liked milk boxes, and realizing that the boy had spent a quarter of his allowance on buying a pack of many flavored milk boxes just to keep in the fridge for when Kageyama came over(which was frequently).

She noticed how Kageyama always somehow knew that Hinata really liked it when his hair was played with, despite the fact that her brother would never admit such a fact to _anyone,_ but Natsu was surprised because the only other person who ever knew that Shouyou loved when people braided his hair was _herself._

And it made her happy. The same kind of happy from that night Shouyou simply stared out the window with his homework lying unfinished on his desk as the dusk took the day in its arms and covered it in its own red-purple embrace.

Natsu was about to jump outside and surprise the two by yelling suddenly behind them, when she heard Kageyama say something in a tone that she had never heard before.

“Hinata,” the raven-haired boy started, abruptly in the comfortable silence that had overtaken the two boys. It was just his name, but it was said so cautiously, so nervously, so _hesitantly,_ in Kageyama’s deep voice, that Natsu startled. Because Kageyama was _never_ nervous, much less hesitant.

“Hm? What is it, Bakageyama?” Shouyou asked, and Natsu noticed for the first time the way their shoulders brushed against each other’s, the way their hands almost (but not quite) touched on the wooden floors of their stilted wooden walkway, and she realized for the first time that Shouyou’s body seemed to unconsciously lean and bend towards Kageyama’s.

How both of their eyes, when they looked into each other’s, were so full of that… that ‘like,’ that emotion that was not quite love but halfway there, and she loved the way Shouyou’s face lit up with that.

And it sort of looked… almost like her mother and father did when they looked at each other. But it was different; raw, younger, less intense in some ways, but in others far more.

She took one look at them and stepped back quietly, letting herself fade into the background as she quietly observed.

“... What would you say if,” Kageyama paused, and Natsu found herself able to fill in the blanks in the sentence - ‘Would you hate me if I had a crush on you?’ - because it was so predictable, “if I said I liked you?”

Natsu held her breath, barely able to keep herself from squealing in excitement because - Kageyama _likes_ Shouyou! - it made so much sense and it was so natural, but she kept quiet so as not to disturb their moment.

Shouyou didn’t say anything for a moment, but the breeze picked up and swept the sun’s rays into his hair, shading the world around them in a muted, gentle orange, and Natsu could barely see her brother’s eyes as he looked up at Kageyama and said quietly declared, “I like you too.”

The world was illuminated in electrifying, saturated hues of orange, contrasted against the purple inked shadows of nightfall. A lamp that hung outside the door to the backyard turned on, casting their shadows large and sharp on the grass in their yard.

In Kageyama’s midnight eyes, the sun gleamed and shimmered, looking down at Hinata like his world revolved around her brother. In Hinata’s eyes, warm brown coffee mixed with the little lights of stars across the universe, meeting Kageyama’s eyes like nothing else mattered but the boy in front of him.

Natsu grinned. Her parents would be glad to hear of this development.

 

»»————-　♡　————-««

 

“Kage-nii-chan?” Natsu approached the older boy carefully. It had been a little over a year since Shouyou and Kageyama had started dating, and Natsu had recently noticed the gradual change in the way her brother looked at his boyfriend.

“Hm? Oh, what is it, Natsu?” Kageyama looked up, setting his phone down on the coffee table next to him. Shouyou had gone to help their mother with groceries in the small convenience store a few blocks down, and the woman had insisted that Kageyama stay to watch Natsu, lest the young girl cause any trouble around the house without supervision. “Do you need anything?”

Natsu hummed. She wasn’t quite sure how to word her question, but she quickly decided it didn’t really matter as long as she got her point across

“You look at Shou-chan differently,” she grinned happily, bouncing on the balls of her feet.

“H-huh?” Kageyama gaped, baffled. “What… does that even mean?” his face was dusted in pink, and Natsu couldn’t help but think that the color was distinct against his skin tone and his dark hair and eyes.

“It means that you look at him differently,” the little girl shrugged, unsure of how else to explain it.

“Differently than…?” the teenager asked.

“Than when you confessed to each other.”

“Wha- you-you saw that?”

“Yep!”

“N-Natsu! You can’t-” Kageyama held himself back, and Natsu wondered if he was trying not to call her a dumbass or something. “That dumbass… He didn’t tell me that-” he muttered quietly to himself.

“Shou-chan doesn’t know I saw it either, I think.”

“... Oh.”

“Yep. But,” she plopped down on the other side of the low table, leaning her head down on the glossy wood, “it’s like, when you first told each other you liked each other, the sparkles were like, stars. Smaller. And both of you were super awkward. And whenever Shou-chan stared at you he would deny it, and so would you. Even though you both did it, a lot.

“Also,” she closed her eyes, a little tired from thinking so hard about this, “you… you guys were sort of like… like the new cafe that opened next to the 7-Eleven.”

“What? That doesn’t make any sense,” Kageyama furrowed his eyebrows.

“Let me finish! Cuz it’s like, pretty, and new, and it feels super cool to be in it, right?” Natsu looked up at him in her explanation.

“... I… guess,” Kageyama blushed a little more.

“Yeah. But now it’s like you two are the old bakery that’s been down the road since Mom was a kid,” she paused, waiting for him to butt in. He didn’t, just stared intently down at the table, so she kept talking. “It’s really comfortable there. And it’s not as super-new-feeling as the cafe, but it’s sorta better, cuz it’s warmer there, and we all love everything about it, including that little dent in the wall that Shou-chan made when he tripped and knocked over a chair into the wall.

“But with that cafe, I don’t like it as much cuz it’s all so sharp that if I even see a stain on the table I like the place less.”

“Well,” Kageyama nodded a bit, “that makes sense.”

“It does? I mean, I guess,” Natsu pondered out loud, “you have been a thing for a while now.”

“Yes.”

“What do you think the change means?”

“Hm?”

“The change in how he looks at you. And how you look at him.”

Kageyama smiled, genuinely, delicately, a rare sight even these days, that Natsu continuously found startling. And the subdued rays of the winter sun gingerly tickled the two, and the barely-open door to their backyard allowed in an invigorating gust that swept Kageyama’s hair to the side, his smile growing a little lopsided, the frosted scene in the teen’s universe-dark eyes, the sun that she saw a little over a year ago highlighted the colors of his emotions.

Natsu could see them clearer, now. Embers, embers that smoldered in the dark night, stars that radiated their own alluring, benign halo, murals and cityscapes and canvases strewn in warm yellows and oranges and purples that replicated sundown, in exuberant greens and blues that illustrated the trees and skies of summer, and Natsu swore she could see every moment Kageyama ever felt _more_ than ‘liking’ Shouyou.

“I think it just means,” he colored only a tiny bit, clearly not very embarrassed about his admission, “that he’s my soulmate.”

 

»»————-　♡　————-««

 

“Natsu!” Shouyou opened the door to his little sister’s room swiftly. “Natsu?”

“Hi, Shou-chan,” Natsu mumbled into her pillow.

Shouyou sighed. Natsu heard his feet carry him next to her low bed, which was placed in the corner of her room farthest from the door. He sat down on the edge of her bed, and she moved her blankets down a little more to look at him. “What’s wrong,” he asked, quietly, after a moment.

Natsu stayed quiet for a moment. “Nothing.”

“C’mon, Natsu, it’s clearly not nothing. Was it someone at your school? Are there bullies?”

“No! No, Shou-chan, it’s not school.”

“So there _is_ something wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just,” she shrugged, “a lot.”

“What’s a lot?”

“I don’t know.” She did, in fact, know.

Shouyou sighed again. “Natsu.”

“I know, I know…” she brought the blankets up to her face again. “Shou-chan?”

“Hm?”

“What’s a soulmate?”

“Er… a soulmate?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I guess… It’s like a best friend, but more,” he stopped, probably expecting Natsu to start talking again. She didn’t. “It’s someone who… inspires you. The person who believes in you and accepts you when no one else does, and no matter what happens, you’ll always love them,” his voice was hushed, a little muffled through the blankets over her head, and the only thing she could see was the yellow light that filtered through her blankets from her lamp. “Someone… who you can carry with you. Forever.”

Natsu smiled, closing her eyes. She was tired.

“That’s good, then.”

“... yeah.”

That night, Natsu dreamt of crushes, of love, and soulmates.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading.  
> <3


End file.
